Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday July 10, 2012 @02:06PM
from the looking-forward-to-more-games-about-hats dept.

Valve has announced a new system called Greenlight, which will allow the gaming community to select which games get chosen for distribution via Steam. Developers will post information about their games — this can be screenshots and videos, or even concepts and potential game mechanics for titles still in development. Once posted, the Steam community will be able to vote on which ones are the best. This will prioritize which games become available on Steam first. Greenlight is Valve's attempt to solve what they call an "intractable problem" — figuring out ahead of time what games players will like. They also hope to facilitate the development of interesting games. "We think it's going to encourage this virtuous development cycle. The problem we had of, how do we encourage somebody when they're not done developing yet? This we think will work. We think a bunch of people will be looking at it going, 'oh my gosh, I want that.'"

Does the developer have to submit it for vote or is Value going to be proactive in putting games up to vote? I know the developer has to actually make arrangements for the game to actually be sold but I don't see why they need to be included in the vote. I think such a system could actually encourage developers to sell their games on steam when they might not otherwise do so. If they know they are highly sought and already have a huge customer base on Steam, why wouldn't they put their games on Steam?

You'll need a valid and non-limited Steam account (yes, that means you'll need to own a game on Steam). Then, you'll need to fill out the submission form, including some information about you and your game. The submission will require:

A square branding image (similar to a box cover) to represent your game in lists and search
At least 1 video showing off your game or presenting your concept
At least 4 screenshots or

It was already tried with Mass Effect 3. Of course since EA is actively trying to replace Steam with Origin it probably isn't the best example. I'm guessing Valve gets inundated with indie developers wanting to get on Steam. This would crowdsource the selection process instead of leaving it to a handful of people who's taste in games may or may not be similar to yours. That way Valve devotes its resources to titles which already have interest instead of the "lets toss this against the wall and see if if it

If they know they are highly sought and already have a huge customer base on Steam, why wouldn't they put their games on Steam?

Because they're competing with Steam?

I can predict what the results would be if they tried putting up any game for vote. Battlefield 3 and all the other Origin-only games. Followed by Minecraft and the "Games for Windows"-only titles.

Minecraft sells itself - it doesn't use any "stores", because given how frequently they used to update, no store in their right mind would take them. And now they've found they can sell it themselves without much difficulty.

Similar experience here. EA's DLC system for the ME/DA games is awful. I still haven't managed to get non-broken archives of the two largest DLC for ME2. I don't have problems with large downloads from anyone else. That's on top of the huge hassle their site is to navigate (whoever designed it should never ever be allowed to design a user interface again) and their stupid "points" you have to purchase to buy things.

Their DLC portal is shit, Origin is shit, and both seem designed to make giving them mone

I know there is a couple of things i would love to change, such as 1.-On the big lists of games on the Steam sales have an icon or change the color of the listing or SOMETHING that lets us know the game uses any DRM other than Steam. I already got bit in the ass by a GFWL game thanks to THAT one, and 2.-Have a setting where we can choose to tell our friends "This user prefers ONLY Steam and no third party DRM" because when you receive a present from

BTW OT but anybody know when the big summer sale starts? My youngest has been saving up for it and I swear every other question is "Has it started yet?" so knowing the date and time would be nice, thanks.

I'd rather have it the other way around; how do I vote to get a game OFF Steam? I bought a game on retail DVD and missed the fine print on the spine that said Steam was required. The miserable thing had to go through a huge download despite the DVD and it always wants to be connected to log in to the Steam account to play in single player mode. Highly irritating!

I read somewhere that this happens if you shut down your computer without first exiting steam. I had exactly the same problem you describe, and then I started closing steam manually before shutting down. Works for me, hopefully it will for you too.

What's to convert? We're talking about new games here. If the developer would like them to one day be distributed on Steam, they're certainly going to design them with Steam in mind. Single-player games need little or no work to be usable on Steam. The Steam client already has a wrapper to let you use the Steam overlays (chat, etc.) within arbitrary games if you use Steam as the launcher. The little bit of actual work would be to throw in some dumb "achievements" and allow games to be saved on the Steam se

What makes their problem intractable? What is the marginal cost of publishing a game on Steam, once that game is fully produced and (presumably) ready to be sold on a DVD/BD? If their business process or technology makes it's very expensive to publish via Steam such that they have to go through an editorial process to insure highly salable content, then I think the problem is not with the editorial process but the underlying publishing technology/process.

Publishing angry birds onto the Apple store is easy because apple has a dedicated team to sift through the crap from the cream. This also leads to Apple favouritism in apps and makes publishing very luck of the draw. Valve wants the neat, tidy, clean environment Apple products have, but without all the politics and costs. Even the Google play store has a minimal approval process. Valve does not want to hire a team, lest that be another expense and essentially hold them liable for review and what makes it.

The filtering that Apple is doing is simply to prevent malware and pornography from entering the App Store. They aren't selecting Angry Birds in favor of Contented Birds because the latter is a shitty, boring game that no one will buy.

This Greenlight idea won't prevent malware from entering the Steam marketplace (Valve still needs to do a QA check for that), and if anything it will increase the pornographic games available.

Apple absolutely claim they will reject apps because they're shit. They in fact do reject apps that are just websites loaded in a webview, or that are nothing but marketing material, or are inferior clones of apps of a type that are already numerous in the store (the way they put it is something like "we have enough fart apps, thank you"). They also reject apps with obvious bugs, or that just work very poorly.

That's not to say there aren't examples of all of those things that make it through, but if you t

Publishing angry birds onto the Apple store is easy because apple has a dedicated team to sift through the crap from the cream. This also leads to Apple favouritism in apps and makes publishing very luck of the draw. Valve wants the neat, tidy, clean environment Apple products have, but without all the politics and costs. Even the Google play store has a minimal approval process. Valve does not want to hire a team, lest that be another expense and essentially hold them liable for review and what makes it.

So they developed an intelligent solution: they don't have to hire a team that sifts through and decide what looks good, the users do. They aren't liable for what makes it on their, its up to the developer. They aren't directing games, they aren't influencing game production, its straight on just being a conduit between gamers and developers, for a smaller cost than hiring people to manage that connection.

Valve does have a team for this, and they still will (since the community is most certainly not 100% reliable). I'm still slightly uncertain what the point of Greenlight is, but I imagine Valve probably got contacted by angry developers/fans screaming "why is x game not on Steam?!?!?" This helps to solve that issue. Now they can point to Greenlight and say "well, it either isn't on there or doesn't have enough people who want it on Steam. You want it on Steam? Fix those problems." Boom, problem solved for V

It would probably have more to do with the legal issues and that a game developer must allow Steam to have digital distribution rights and quite an incredibly powerful license to the software. You see, Valve doesn't sell games on Steam. They sell subscriptions to a license to a game. Valve owns the licenses, you own a very limited subscription to that license, and it affords you no rights under law, and it can be terminated at Valve's discretion for any reason or no reason. To distribute a game under that framework, I presume there's legal footwork to be done, and to do that for EVERY SINGLE GAME ANYONE EVER MADE, EVER would be an intractable problem indeed. If you go into it with a publisher saying "our customers want this game" and they deal with the legal issues up front, customers get games they want and Valve has less legal work to do.

I still say nobody should ever buy a game from Steam again. The reason they can sell games at 80% off is because you never actually own a copy of any game purchased through Steam, so you're literally paying Valve to let you play in their sandbox; at the end of the day, you have to go home, and all the toys stay with Valve. This is the most anti-consumer system I could imagine; complete and total dismissal of all consumer rights.

Yes but it's a really well designed sand-box that is open virtually 24/7 and has all these neat features that really enhance the entire idea of sand. I can have friend lists, achievements, screenshots, video replays, join communities, keep up to date with the sand castles all my friends are making, be able to play with that sand in any box I install in any house, and they make sure all the sand stays patched without me having to ask for it.

All of this can be provided while using software that is licensed to the buyer, not to Valve. Steam can also in that case implement a market for used game licenses. The reason Valve doesn't do this is because they believe they will make more money if you never own a copy of a game and that nobody else can ever purchase your used copy (you have to buy it fresh from Steam or trade an unbound game). One could very easily re-implement all of Steam's features for these games without the draconian and probably

I guess if by your admission, all definitions of "greed" are indeed "evil" then yes - I don't think there is anything I could say to change that idea. I feel that our world is defined by shades of gray, so a company looking to make the maximum amount of money out of me doesn't have to be evil, they are just trying to make a maximum amount of money out of me as I imagine you're trying to make the maximum amount of value out of your products.

They start to feel evil the first time you buy a game on Steam that is unplayable. Their answer: "too bad." The last time I bought a game in a store that didn't work, I got a refund or a replacement, my choice.

And to your point about profit, it has never been demonstrated that disallowing sales of used copies reduces profit. Just as it has never been proved that piracy actually impacts the sales of copyrighted material. The fashion industry doesn't get copyright protection, and they stand by the argu

Part of the requirement of being on Greenlight is that your game must support Windows. If you want to make it a selling point that it also supports Max OS (and linux once steam adds that) you are free to do so.

I think that case-sensitive is a rather deliberate setting that is not default at any Mac system, and Valve may not even have had the idea they needed to fix that.
However, with the Linux release, maybe they will patch it on Mac too.

I hope not. Still, it will be interesting to see how many of the people that vote "yes" to a game end up purchasing it when/if it appears on Steam. Lots of games look promising, then fail to deliver. Just because a lot of people said "get it on Steam" doesn't mean I'm going to skip reviews.

I think where this process could really shine is with older back catalog games. I'd bet plenty of publishers would love to release older games and milk them a little longer, but there's a good chance the cost of doin

I've seen this a few times now but I don't understand how people will think a lot of "joke games" will be submitted to the Greenlight process. This seems like kind of a Big Deal, letting users decide the company's potential cash flow, so why would they just allow literally ANY game onto it? Do these people think Valve will just release Greenlight and then never look at the process again, allowing whatever porn/hate game to be submitted?

All games are not available, they can only vet and look through so many games - there is a backlog of games they need to approve, that is the whole purpose of this. They can't just say "everyone gets in!" they have to have some kind of process.

It would be interesting if this could be leveraged to enable boycotting of games that are slated to use nasty drm or are made by less liked companies. I doubt it would end up seriously happening, but it would be interesting to see how things go, if all games go through this for initial approval. The vocal people tend to be those with strong opinions, after all.

It's about damn time... My first vote goes for No Time to Explain. [tinybuildgames.com]
Which is a Kickstarter funded game that's better in quality and humour than many games on Steam, but was rejected for some unknown reason -- I can only assume the Steam folks are intractable morons: This game is awesome, and I know of many indie devs with the same story, "Everyone likes my game, except Steam reviewers." I've met folks who only buy games if they are on Steam, I've also met folks who only shop at Walmart... Neither situat

if its on steam, chances are its better than the alternatives (origins, blizzard's always online thing, etc).

Bioware had "leave the dvd in" if you played Dragon Age, but now that a lot of people are using laptops and dvd drives may be disappearing in the forseeable future (see: retina mbp, mb air), an online option is desirable. (they even were relatively reasonable on selling used copies - just that you wouldn't get some DLC which was desirable)

it continues to amaze me that they become such sheep when Steam is mentioned.

I'm not sure sheep is really the right word here. Fairly certain most, if not everyone, on/. who uses Steam (myself included) are well aware that it is DRM. Hypocrite would seem to be a better word, though even then I would have to disagree. Finding some instances of DRM to be deplorable but other forms to be acceptable does not a hypocrite make.

You might be surprised. Not so much here, but on a few game forums I frequent, it's head-deskingly painful how often someone will decry Steam's DRM and get a slew of "it's not REALLY DRM" excuses, plus the new Diablo III favorite "Get a real internet connection, looser[sic]!"

This is my favorite, because it is very suburban/urban centered, and is easily argued against by pointing out that not everyone lives in urban areas. It is my favorite, because that line of conversation invariably leads to my second favorite pearl of wisdom, "WELL, if you don't like crappy internet, move out of the country."

It's as if people don't understand where food comes from, that the people who make that food also enjoy/have a use for technology, and that the countryside isn't actually full of castles

Steam's subscription model is anti-consumer; that itself is sufficient to warrant dismissal of Steam as a valid outlet for purchasing games, regardless of any DRM they impose, be it permissive or not. You don't have any rights to that content outside of what Valve says you can do with it (sure, you can run it offline and you can make backups to save us money on bandwidth, but nope, you can never resell it, or run it without steam, because you don't own the copy!). Nope. Buy games THEN put them on Steam.

But you can sell that DVD copy back to the store or to another person, in general, and it's becoming a trend now to consider licenses re-sellable too, so account-bound DRM (aka Digital Rights Removal) will be either illegal or must facilitate the trade of licenses in the future (in the EU now, probably in NA soon enough). I buy an MMO, play it for 3 months, farm everything out, and I can usually sell my account for more money than I paid to play the game in total.

You have to run Steam even in wine to run any game you purchased through the Steam Store. You still have to run it. If you own the game separately and it has wine support, it's trivial to run it on OSX or Linux.

It doesn't encrypt anything except unreleased, pre-loaded content (which is decrypted when the game is actually released).It allows you to go into offline mode, and to back up your games to DVD.It doesn't itself restrict anything except the.exe - I copied the DLC files from my Steam install of Oblivion to my retail install of Oblivion with no problems (it was cheaper to buy the "Deluxe" all-DLC-included version on Steam than to buy all the DRM alone).It includes a notice on any game that includes additional DRMIt doesn't do any spying other than the opt-in Steam Hardware SurveyIt tries to be a beneficial service, including chat and modding featuresIt hosts, for free and without DRM, user-created mods for several gamesIt supports OS X, and is expected to shortly support LinuxIt does not in practice restrict what you can do with your data (the ban on sharing, trading or selling accounts is not strictly enforced)Valve has pledged to, should they go out of business, release a DRM-remover for any games they legally can. (and Steam is easily broken, if you wish to)

So given a choice between "not getting the game at all", "pirating the game", "buying it on Steam" or "buying it on some far more DRM-encumbered platform", is it really a wonder that people choose "buy on Steam"?

Yes, in theory, everyone should boycott DRM. But this is the Real World, and out here, you have to make compromises. Steam is the best compromise solution - it eliminates or ameliorates the problems with DRM, but still placates the corporations' concerns about digital distribution and "piracy".

Indeed. When you look at a lot of the "other" gaming companies out there, Steam/Valve seems to generally be the most customer-centric. They make a lot of effort into providing useful services to their customers.

Other companies' foray in the world of DRM has met with broken CD-ROM drives, unplayable games, and a generally lousy customer experience.Steam is making inroads to embrace a wider market and is quite supportive of indie-style games. IMHO, others seem to have opted for a poor parody of the Steam plat

My only real complain with steam is that all games are locked to a single account on a single PC (e.g. I can't have two games across one account active on two different systems).

Offline mode. I use it regularly for LAN gaming.

Start Steam on one computer, go into offline mode. Repeat for all (n - 1) remaining computers. Last one can stay in online mode. Start up a local server on any of them, have the rest join. Bam. LAN party on (n) computers with 1 copy of the game.

The only thing offline mode really stops you from doing is updating, chatting or using the server browser (IIRC, you can still directly connect to internet servers). So for single-player games or for LAN, it works perfectly (at least until one of them updates and gets out of synch).

You forgot that the DRM is mostly in furtherance of the primary benefit to consumers, namely that it allows you to redownload your games anywhere you want, as quickly as your internet will go. Without DRM, it's effectively a free-for-all, since Steam works by basically allowing anybody to get the files, but not be able to use them unless the account is authorized. A friend can log into your machine with his account, download and play one of his games, and it'll still show up in the list on your machine, but

Except they have the most draconian DRM system ever invented in the history of man: all you purchase is a revocable once-billed subscription to a license of a game. That means you don't have first sale rights or any rights under copyright law. That means you don't even own a license. Valve owns your license, and all you have is an active subscription to the game via Valve. Non-ownership of paid for merchandise is far beyond anything else you listed.

I've owned many Steam games for years. I have never had any problem at all with them. While what you say is technically true, experience has shown me that it's more of a conspiracy theory than anything substantial to worry about.

Valve is no EA, they're no Ubisoft, they're no Activision/Blizzard. I trust Valve. And I think Valve knows that a lot of their company is built on goodwill and trust from gamers.

Until I see Valve treat their customers like shit, I'm going to keep buying games on Steam in prefere

Buy a game and have it not work. Valve will "troubleshoot" for you and then tell you to go fuck yourself. Do that to a legitimate software retailer and they'll give you a refund. Buy a car, have it not work, take it back to the dealer and they'll fix it or give you another one, or a refund. Buy a new computer, have a part that's defective, get it replaced or get a refund. Hell, buy a new computer, sell your old one to someone else. Have you tried selling a CS 1.6 copy on Steam to another person? Hint

Forget it. When you've got a minority viewpoint (e.g. not trusting Steam) it's extremely hard to get anyone to listen and those that do already have their mind set and would rather joke about you "missing out" rather than seriously consider your words. There's something about games that gets even Slashdotters to forget their anti-DRM principles - as if they can't non-DRM games from somewhere else legally, but they chose not to because they can't handle not having the latest regenerating-health shooter.

I don't think you 'own' Windows, other games, music CDs, the DVDs and BluRays you have in your collection, the books you read, etc etc. Not 'own' in the sense that you can run off copies and distribute them yourself, pocketing the cash. With those products you have a 'licence to use'. Steam is the same.

From your post, (I will never purchase another game via Steam), it sounds like you had a bad experience with Steam. What was it?

When you buy a book or a cd/dvd/bd, you own a copy, and as a copy holder, you have certain rights granted by copyright law. Those include the right to make copies for personal use and sell your copy but not to distribute copies. This is true of a lot of software, though the trend is towards licenses in software. A recent ruling in the EU has established there that licenses are transferable too, like a copy. Steam, however, sells you a subscription to a license to further obfuscate ownership and deny con

Yes, in theory, everyone should boycott DRM. But this is the Real World, and out here, you have to make compromises. Steam is the best compromise solution - it eliminates or ameliorates the problems with DRM, but still placates the corporations' concerns about digital distribution and "piracy".

I strongly disagree. You don't have to buy with Steam - why not GOG.com? They won't have quite the selection sure, but are you honestly going to tell me you have the time available to play all the games you want anywa

1 they are semi cool about redownloading games2 they include a patching service3 it works well and does not trash most systems in the process4 you buy in some cases multiplatform versions (i think some games if you buy the windows version but log into a Mac system it will download the Mac Version)

in cases where a publisher does not ADD DRM on top (or otherwise futz with things) it looks to be the best setup around for DRM Platforms.

Unless there are problems I've not heard about, Valve are more than "semi-cool". Every game I've bought is still showing in the list and I've redownloaded my whole library more than once without so much as a single email to Valve.

.exes were also mentioned further up. Depending on the game, a simple no-cd crack is all that's needed to de-Steam them.

What puzzles me is how users are expected to sift the crap without already having bought the game from somewhere else; if they have then why would they vote to a

Why would I want the best games incumbered by Steams DRM? I refuse to buy any game with this DRM, and if enough people did then DRM would wither and die. Most of the/. community seems to understand the evils of DRM, it continues to amaze me that they become such sheep when Steam is mentioned.

I guess one man's flamebait is another man's insightful. I do like Steam and have a few games on it, but the consolation I had to make when getting those games is that one day they'll suddenly disappear.

I have the same concern that the original poster has about us getting lured in with candy. It's worthy of discussion, therefore not flamebait.

True, but bandying words like "sheep" does tend to tip the balance for some people. If someone makes an insightful point but does it in such a way as to sound like a hot-headed ass then obviously they're less likely to get the +1 they deserve. (Not a comment on the parent, BTW, just in general.)

Incidentally, if you trust Gabe the last thing Valve will do before going bust will be to release a master key or something to remove the DRM on games. Mind you, I think he said that before 3rd party games were sold

I'd say that you can play those games offline as long as you keep your steam folder intact. It's not like that will suddenly disappear.
Unless, of course, Gabe goes crazy and pushes an update wiping your steam folder.

I'm sure Valve will be watching closely how many people vote for a game vs how many of those same people actually buy it. The whole thing is largely an experiment: Valve likes to do that. Some of them fail (like the Half-Life episodes, which was supposed to be small bits of content every few months. Yeah, about that...) Some of them succeed beyond their wildest dreams, like F2P TF2.